idk, when I want productivity I go with nodejs these days. lodash for some quick data crunching and pg or mariadb for db access using promises simply beats native php functions. with express you can spawn a http server in under 10 lines, while with php you need to setup apache/nginx or docker.
at some point in the past PHP was the most productive tool for some quick & dirty coding, but not anymore for me.
at some point in the past PHP was the most productive tool for some quick & dirty coding, but not anymore for me.